Señora Morales, one of six foreign language teachers at WHS, she grew up in Colchester, CT.
Her mother decided to send all of her children to be exchange students to learn another language and culture because she didn’t want her children to grow up ignorant about the world. Señora and her siblings all spent their sophomore years in high school in another country. She was the only one to go to a Spanish-speaking country while her siblings went to Belgium and France to learn French.
She spent six months living in Colombia with her host family: After three months there, she could understand everything and by the time she left: “I Could say almost anything I Wanted.”
Morales loved Colombia and its culture and was sad to go home. She went back to Colombia after graduating from college with a Spanish degree and intended to live the rest of her life there. However, her dream of living in Colombia came to an end because she only had a tourist visa and had to return home after a year.
Morales didn’t plan on being a teacher because both her mother and father had been teachers, and they didn’t like it and had a collection of horrible stories.
She tried travel and tourism for a while, working at Bradley International Airport with Delta Express Airlines. It was a fun job working as a flight attendant, but the pay was horrible. She also tried working for the cruise lines, but again, the pay was horrible. This is when she became a teacher, cleaning houses to pay off her graduate degree in education.
Morales started her career teaching Spanish in 1989. Her first job was at Hartford High School, then a year in Coventry. She worked in Groton for three years, and finally ended up in Waterford in 1994.
In Waterford, she taught Spanish in elementary school for 14 years, 4 years at Clark Lane, and finally started at high school in 2010.
At the high school she was only given the opportunity to teach the non-honor level classes and taught Spanish 1-4. She also had to create all the materials for two semester courses: Spanish for Healthcare, which is no longer offered, and Hispanic Studies: The Arts.
After her 30th year at Waterford and her 34th year teaching, she will be retiring in June. She hopes that the impact she had on her students will be long-lasting and meaningful. The 5 things she wants her students to take away are:
- Anyone can learn another language! The proof is that they have already learned to speak one.
… English!
- I would like them to have an open mind about other cultures, ways to live life and tolerance.
- I want my students to keep trying. We learn the most from our failures, not our successes!
- That it’s important to learn and be able to work with people we don’t necessarily like.
- The key to getting what we want is consistency in working towards our goals.
In her retirement she will spend time with her husband, Edwin Morales. He is from Puerto Rico and they both speak Spanish and English to each other.
In her free time she enjoys spending time with family and friends, shopping, swimming, walking, hiking and horseback riding –she used to compete in her younger years.
She loves to travel and has traveled to Europe, Central and South America, the Caribbean and Canada. She plans to travel as much as she can when she retires.
Señora Morales explained that the hardest thing about retiring is leaving her students behind. She loves spending time with them and talking about all kinds of topics with them. She loves to know about their lives and what is important to them. She enjoys seeing how creative they can be along with their sense of humor. Señora explains, “I will miss celebrating their accomplishments and trying to help when they are going through a hard time or a heartbreak. I am going to miss my students a lot!”
